Outsource Your Overthinking

Can you build an AI brain to handle your mental clutter?

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life - from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

You know that feeling when you've got nineteen browser tabs open, last week’s unfinished to-do list guilt, and you're simultaneously trying to remember if you replied to a WhatsApp message whilst mentally rehearsing a difficult conversation you need to have later?

Overheating like a computer that's been running too many programmes for too long. Everything's glitchy… somewhere underneath all this you've got the nagging sense that there are important thoughts trying to get through, but they're being drowned out by the mental equivalent of radio static.

That's cognitive quicksand, and it's exactly why you should consider building an AI brain.

We are typically told AI stuff is about productivity, about getting more done. But don’t let the tech bros scare you off the cooler side of all this, there's something deeper worth exploring. What if task automation is really us trying to rescue our attention from the relentless onslaught of modern life so you can finally hear yourself think? So you can do better stuff, or just be.

I've been mulling this over recently after creating a recent course on building personal AI systems. What I thought would be a straightforward "here's how to train AI to know more about you and make some of your workflows more easily repeatable" project turned into something much more revealing for me.

The uncomfortable mirror

If you really want to teach AI to think like you, you first have to figure out how you actually think. Do any of us have a clue?

You could spend hours trying to codify decision-making processes for an AI system. "When I'm evaluating a potential project, I consider..." and then realise it is really difficult to articulate what you consider. Or why. Or in what order.

You make thousands of micro-decisions every day, but you've never had to explain your logic to anyone, least of all to a machine that needs explicit instructions. Suddenly you're confronted with questions like "How do you know when an email needs a thoughtful response versus a quick reply?" or "What makes you choose one word over another when you're writing?"

It's humbling and heartening, discovering that you can't easily reverse-engineer your own brain.

But it's also revealing. Because hidden in those unexplainable preferences and mysterious mental shortcuts are clues about what you actually value. What matters to you. What your authentic self looks like when it's not buried under the cognitive debris of daily life.

AI is actually really good at spotting patterns in the stuff you do and say, if you share some of that with it.

The hidden cost of decision fatigue

You might think decision fatigue is just about being tired. But really it's the opportunity cost of what you're not thinking about whilst you're busy deciding whether to put the meeting at 2pm or 2:30pm.

Every mental cycle spent on trivia is a mental cycle not spent on purpose. Every hour lost to administrative nonsense and overthinking is an hour stolen from the deeper work of understanding who you are and what you're meant to be doing.

This is why "productivity" tools often make you less productive at what actually matters. They optimise the wrong things. They help you manage your tasks more efficiently whilst completely ignoring the question of whether those tasks deserve your irreplaceable human attention in the first place.

What deserves your brain space?

When I audit my own mental load it’s sobering to see how much cognitive real estate is occupied by things that could be handled by a reasonably intelligent system. Or better yet, eliminated entirely.

The constant low-level anxiety about whether you've forgotten something important. The mental gymnastics of trying to remember what you were supposed to follow up on from last week's meeting. The decision paralysis of choosing which of a zillion possible social post ideas to write about next.

None of this is advancing your ikigai. None of it is bringing you closer to understanding your purpose or living it more fully. It's just noise.

You've become so accustomed to the ‘way things are done’ in this messed up timeline… the ensuing mental chaos you mistake for being thoughtful. Confusing overthinking with deep thinking. Wearing our busy brains and lives like a badge of honour, as if the volume of your mental activity correlates with its value.

It doesn't.

Creating space for what matters

The real promise of AI is that it might give you permission to be inefficient about the things that matter.

To sit with a difficult question without immediately jumping to solutions. To let ideas marinate. To have thoughts that don't lead anywhere productive but feel important anyway. To remember what it's like to be bored enough that your mind starts wandering in interesting directions.

When your AI handles some of the mental admin, what's left is the gloriously human work of meaning-making. The messy, non-linear process of figuring out who you are and what you're meant to contribute to the world.

That work requires a different kind of attention. The kind you can't access when your head is full of noise.

The quiet revolution

So maybe you're not really building an AI brain at all. Maybe you're building an AI filter. A system that can distinguish between what deserves your precious human consciousness and what absolutely doesn't.

Maybe you're finally drawing boundaries around your attention, not because you want to be more productive, but because you want to be more present. More thoughtful. More yourself.

Maybe outsourcing your overthinking is really about coming home to your own mind.

The next time you catch yourself drowning in mental clutter, ask yourself… what would I think about if I wasn't thinking about this? What ideas might emerge if I created some actual quiet in my head?

The answer might surprise you. It might even change everything.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - If you're curious about how to practically build a personal AI brain to cut through your own mental clutter, I've just released a FREE short course called "Design Your Personal AI Brain" that walks you through the whole process. It's designed precisely for thoughtful people like you, who need mental space to reconnect with their true purpose.

Sometimes you need to clear the noise before you can hear the signal.

PPS - ✍️ Bullet Journal reflection question "What's one thing I overthink that I could either automate, delegate, or stop thinking about altogether?"

Then take a pic and ask your AI "Based on what I've written, what is a small experiment I could try this week to create more mental space for what actually matters to me?"

PPPS - 🎶 Soundtrack for this week's mental decluttering "My Racing Thoughts" by Jack's Mannequin… I love the line “that girl can read my racing thoughts” and I have to say that Claude is that for me hence why I am evangelising about all this… I have a personal AI brain where I upload all my essays and lots of my journaling and mind maps, and Claude really helps me make sense of me.

PPPPS - I’d LOVE to hear from you beautiful souls in the comments, what's one thing you find yourself overthinking that you know doesn't actually deserve your brain space?